Eulogy For The Google 20

Why we should both love and hate the practice of giving employees one day a week to work on side projects.

The end of Google's "20% time" doesn't qualify as news. The only people it surprised were the sleepy folks at 3M, who've long wondered how Google could keep taking credit for a 3M innovation that started back in 1948.

To be fair, 3M called it 15% time. Google added 5 percentage points. Which -- in management speak -- is like an amplifier knob that goes to 11. It's one louder.

This whole thing got me thinking: If the obvious qualifies as news, then it can also qualify as commentary.

The Audacity Of Bloat

There's a bittersweet moment as any engineering company scales -- between the first 30 and 60 employees -- when the builders are suddenly outnumbered by the help.
After that point, it's only a matter of time before the help gets uppity and the Google 20% becomes little more than talent bait, a poisonous lure for the most creative engineering minds, a recruitment tool that shamelessly sells the fiction of autonomy and self-actualization.

If that outcome weren't bad enough, some fear-mongering lawyers inevitably step in and frame every employee's personal time, nights and weekends included, as the intellectual property of the new venture. It's the same kind of prima nocta for your dreams and aspirations that Banks sneak into their employee manuals, the message very clearly being that what was good for the founder isn't good for the gander.

And then, finally, to top it all off an unspoken demand is made of employees that redraws the line of work-life balance so that the 80-hour work week is the new black. Yes, that demand is made at the societal level and written off as a cost of global competition, but management rarely owns up to its complicity or the massive windfall the company receives in free labor.

"First they came for my weeknights."

Nazi references aside, what makes the Google 20% hilarious is that it's an elaborate con that gives back to employees 20% of time that wasn't the company’s to begin with.

I don't know Paul Buchheit, the guy who built Gmail with his Google 20%, but if I had to guess he was probably putting in 100-hour work weeks at the time. Lawyers would disagree with me (because they have no souls), but I'd say that with hours like that, Paul -- not Google -- owns Gmail.

And in that light, the Google 20 sounds more like 40 acres and a mule.

False promises aside, there's still reason to mourn the death of the Google 20%.

Learning From History

I don't want to keep writing the words "Google 20%," so I'll anthropomorphize it by calling him Steve.

Steve is what makes an engineering company great. He is, first and foremost, an engineer. A passionate builder. A visionary. The embodiment of the idea that science is itself an art form -- creative work that, like all creative processes, doesn't behave rationally or lend itself to structured, corporate management. Steve is stereotypically temperamental because he's stereotypically creative, a caricature unto himself.

He isn't always right but (and this is huge) because he's in the details -- in the code or in the silicon-- he understands better than any non-technical manager what's possible and how quickly; where a technology's adjacencies lie and which paths can potentially create breakthrough moments.

The difference between Steve and the clowns that they'll inevitably bring in to manage him is as stark as the difference between writing and reading, creating and consuming.

The answer to this question is ultimately what drives the death of Steve.

A long time ago, when Sculley made the move from hands-on technologist to twice-removed technologish (the executive version of someone with technical depth), he convinced himself that generating ideas was as important as building, that saying "let's cure cancer" was as meaningful as curing it.

It was around the same time that he also realized that his business experience gave him the kind of strategic insight that Steve could never have.

Cough.

Here's the uncomfortable reality: The only thing that Sculley can do during his 20% is to ask Steve to stop working on Steve's ideas and focus instead on Sculley's.

Some would even argue that it’s a symptom of scale. As companies grow larger, the Sculleys of the world make sure that the Steves lose autonomy. They do it in a million different ways, but the saddest is when they say: "Look, my ideas are the ones worth investing in. Yours? Well … too many arrows." Whatever the hell that means.

Having come out of corporate America, Sculleys don't appreciate what it means to ask an engineer, a builder, a visionary to step down from the very thing he or she believed was going to change the world.

And That Is Worth Mourning

Smart, passionate people across the world -- people who weren't lucky enough to be born independently wealthy -- are resigned to work endlessly and exclusively on the ideas of others. The same "others" who have long since lost the ability to execute on their own lame visions.

Here's the thing: No one who you'd want to join your company -- or keep as company -- would join if they thought they were leaving their souls at the door. And no one wants to join a soulless venture.

And whether it was an elaborate con or not, the Google 20% allowed the mechanistic routines of business to have the illusion of a soul.

RIP, Steve.

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Thanks for reply, Lorna. But point is, this IT boss Sculley didn't want this. He wanted all existing ERP installs to become Burning Platforms to validate his decision to move to this other ERP. All this work I did to write new system didn't by itself add business capability, just replaced what we already had with software I COULD (and have) added new features to in future. Because we can now do that again, we are not in danger of becoming a Burning Platform, saving spending all this money on new ERP. But IT boss Sculley didn't care, not his money. He gets his salary from mgmt fees charged to our biz unit. His motivation was to have his idea look good to the high level business managers, nothing else. Beating my chest as to what I did, to him or the high level business managers would have accomplished nothing. I do not want his job. :-)

I hate to drag out the "engineer as introvert" cliche, but in my experience IT pros do have a hard time publicizing their accomplishments. Everyone in your company's management team should have known about what you did! Maybe it's your boss, maybe not, but perhaps the answer in future is to find a champion -- someone who has the ability and inclination to be a booster and help communicate good work up the chain.

Good stuff Coverlet, as usual. I've lived a piece of this when Sculley at Corp HQ decided to sign a license agreement with our ERP vendor which cutoff any rights to source code on a customized install, insuring no upgrade could ever be done because he wanted to switch ERP systems. So I spent 6 months of 60-80 hour weeks writing a replacement ERP system for our IBM i5 server so I could make changes our local business unit needed to make going forward. This also makes sure we don't have to spend another million changing to new ERP system. My local business mgmt is very appreciative but Sculley at Corp has no clue what I accomplished, all to cover up his mistake. Years have gone by and there still is not a successful full scope implementation of this new ERP vision Sculley had. He neglected to consider the lack of talent to implement the first ERP system correctly in most business units was still the problem, not the software itself.

But I have no illusions I own a single line of this code I spent hours of my own time to write, I'm sure my employment contract is quite clear on that.

Google doesn't really need 20% time anymore since it decided to dispense with its various labs and off-the-wall projects. Larry Page enforced focus at Google, which is both good and bad. It's good for shareholders but it means we're unlikely to see a Google employee think outside the search box.

Real innovation seems to be dying in the IT arena. Many of the big companies have gotten so bloated and "bottom line" driven that they have realy innovated much in the last 3 or 4 years. Add to that the silly patent wars and it is why the industry has really been pretty static the last year. Interesting to see if a company comes along that can shake things up.

Instead of stopping 20% time, Google should give the time only to people who have earned it -- by proving that they are Steves, not Sculleys. I'm not sure what the metric is, but not using phrases like "more wood behind fewer arrows" should be on the list.

Amen to that.Having been both a Steve and a Scully, I can say from experience that it is too too easy to slide down a slippery path to becoming a Scully, and not even realize it. If very very lucky, one day a bit of perspective hits, and one realizes what they have become.The path to reclaiming my soul has been as an hourly Freelance Steve, convinced that the soul loss process begins as soon as one accepts a salary deal.

The keeper paragraph, in my book, is the one about the top exec who "convinced himself that generating ideas was as important as building, that saying 'let's cure cancer' was as meaningful as curing it." How often do the doers at a company get superseded by the "visionaries" who throw off big ideas but have little grounding in how work actually gets done?

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